Scientific Sorcery : 17 Hexometer

I considered the violet dust in my bag and what to do with it. 

Ordinarily, human bones burned up in a crematorium at around 1,000 to 1,300 degrees Celsius becoming dry and brittle and turning into a grayish ash. I wondered what would happen if I heated this crystalline bone dust? Would it catch fire or maybe exhibit the properties of vitrification, aka sand turning into glass?

I filled the base of the forge with coal and set it alight.

While the forge heated up, I retrieved a small clay crucible from a back shelf in the smithy. 

Then, I carefully placed a small mound of the bone dust into the crucible and set it atop the forge. The heart of the forge, fueled by coal and bellows, roared, bathing the smithy in a warm, orange glow. I turned the heat up high, my eyes never leaving the crucible as the bone dust within began to glow.

It didn’t take long. Within moments, the bone dust melted as glass would, coalescing into a single, shimmering bead of liquid violet. I used a pair of tongs to remove the crucible from the forge.

My heart pounded with excitement. I made something without spending centuries growing it!

I dipped a metal rod into the molten bone dust and carefully extracted a small droplet. It cooled rapidly in the frigid air, hardening into a tiny, teardrop-shaped bead. 

I set out to make glass lenses from the dust. 

When they were completed, I waited for the glass to cool and then polished it. 

After that was done, I put a produced lens to my eye, added it to the Astralscope and eyed Stromy through it.

The kitten’s black fur viewed through the lens of the bone-glass combined with a multitude of other crystal lenses, glowed with an ethereal, otherworldly radiance, covered in minute violet radial shimmers. 

Eager to explore further magic smithing, I hurried back to the pub and retrieved a bandit’s heart-gem and gem 51.

Back in the smithy I placed the gems together into the crucible.

It only took a few minutes under high heat for the two crystals to fuse together.

I held the newly fused crystal up to the light, marveling at its iridescent sheen. The heart-gem’s deep crimson had melded seamlessly with the translucent violet-blue of gem 51, creating a unique swirl of colors.

"What do you think, Stormy?" I asked, glancing down at my feline companion. 

"Mrow?" she chirped, violet eyes fixed on the newly produced crystal.

"Yeah, I'm not sure what it does either," I said. "Let's take a closer look."

I settled into a chair, pulling my Astralscope over my eyes. As I peered through the multitude of crystalline lenses, crystal 51 seemed to pulse with an inner fire, tendrils of energy coiling and uncoiling within its depths, projecting out of the gem in radial patterns akin to seeing field lines around a bar magnet.

“Curious,” I murmured. "But how do I measure this increase in magical potential? I need some way to quantify magical power..."

Stormy hopped onto the table, her tail swishing back and forth as she watched me think.

"That's it!" I exclaimed, snapping my fingers. Stormy startled, nearly falling off the table. "We're going to build a magical galvanometer! Well, I’m going to build it. You can watch and tell me if I’m going in the right direction, miss future-seer.”

“Brrrrrr,” Stormy commented, clearly excited by the prospect of managing me. 

She tilted her head at the word galvanometer with a somewhat confused look.

“A galvanometer is an instrument used to detect and measure electric current,” I explained. “It works by indicating the presence of a current and its direction. I think I'm going to call it a… Hexometer! Since it’s going to measure hexes aka presence of magic and its direction.”

I went back into the pub and rummaged through my collection of witch-affected materials, laying them out on the workbench. Stormy perched herself on a nearby table, her violet eyes tracking my every move.

"Alright, let's see what we've got here," I mused, sorting through the items. "We need something conductive for the coil... Ah! This copper wire should do nicely."

I held up a length of copper wire that had taken on a faint violet sheen after prolonged exposure to my domain. Stormy batted at it playfully.

"This is for science, not for playing." I commented.

"Mrrp," Stormy replied, looking thoroughly unconvinced.

I began winding the wire around a wooden spool, creating a tight coil. "The principle here is simple," I explained to my feline audience. "If magical energy behaves anything like electricity, it should create a field when it flows. This coil should hopefully be able to detect that field."

Stormy yawned widely.

"Everyone's a critic," I muttered. "Okay, smarty-paws, which crystal should we use for the needle?"

To my surprise, Stormy hopped down from her perch and pawed at one of the rocks in my pile and then grabbed the coral piece that I had extracted from one of the jewellery sets. Then she dropped the coral atop of the random rock.

“Why this specific rock and the coral?” I asked her.

Stormy shrugged.

“Right, you don’t know why something works, you just somehow know that it will,” I muttered.

I grabbed the rock and the coral and went back to the forge. Both melted and fused quite nicely in the innards of the forge. I poured the superheated drop into the form of a needle and waited for it to cook.

"Let's give it a try." I nodded, picking up the crystalline needle.

I carefully suspended the needle from a thin thread, positioning it at the center of the coil. Then, I connected the ends of the coil to two metal plates - one made from ordinary iron, the other from the witch-bone armor I'd crafted earlier.

"Now for the moment of truth," I announced, reaching for a slightly purple iron flake. "If this works, the crystal should move when exposed to magical energy."

I placed the flake on the witch-bone plate. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, ever so slightly, the crystal needle began to twitch.

"Ha!" I exclaimed triumphantly. "It works!"

Stormy meowed excitedly, her tail swishing back and forth.

"You're right," I agreed. "We need to calibrate it. Let's try different materials and see how they affect the needle."

Over the next few hours, Stormy and I tested various objects from my domain. Regular items didn’t move the needle, while witch-grass and other magically infused materials caused more pronounced movements. The bones from my armor made the needle go wild.

"Fascinating," I muttered, scribbling notes in the Codex. "It seems the strength of the reaction correlates with the level of magical saturation."

Stormy purred contentedly, curled up next to the Hexometer.

"You know," I said, scratching her behind the ears, "I couldn't have done this without you. You're a pretty good lab assistant."

"Mrow," Stormy replied, her eyes half-closed in contentment.

. . .

"Hey, Stormy," I mused as I rubbed gem 51 against a magic-infused wooden board, observing the interaction of two magic waves radiating from gem 51 and the wood with the Astralscope, "I think that we're onto something here. This gem seems to be exhibiting a piezoelectric-like effect.”

Stormy tilted her head, letting out a curious "Mrow?"

"Right, let me explain,” I said. “Piezoelectricity is when certain materials generate an electric charge in response to applied mechanical stress. It's how some lighters work, or how record players turn the vibrations in the grooves into sound."

"Mrrp," Stormy replied, padding over to sit on my lap.

"Exactly!" I said, as if she'd made a profound point. "Material-softening gemstone 51 isn't quite the same as basic quarts which is piezoelectric and can convert mechanical energy into electrical energy. It's responding to magical energy and my fingers in some specific way, not mechanical stress. Instead of generating electricity, it's somehow altering the properties of materials around it making them more malleable.”

“I think I’m going to call this effect Arcanoelastic Resonance,” I said, writing the term into my Codex.

“Brrr brrr,” Stormy shrugged. She didn’t care for how things were named that much.

. . . 

"Alright, little miss future-seer, let's tackle this Arcanoelastic Resonance problem head-on,” I got off my work table in the pub, stretching. 

"Mrow?" Stormy tilted her head, her tail swishing back and forth.

“I think that what I’m going to need is a remote control of sorts for gem 51,” I explained. “I can’t speak to spirits like a witch does via the astral, sooo…”

Stormy tilted her head at me.

“A remote control is a device used to operate another device from a distance, usually wirelessly,” I explained. “All of these spirits stuck within the rocks are performing specific functions within my witchy domain. Gem 51 can somehow make hard materials softer, so it stands to reason that this effect can potentially be controlled remotely, amplified, reduced, reversed. It’s just a matter of figuring out how to order gem 51 to do what I want without talking to it through meditation or whatever.”

“Mbrrr,” Stormy shook her head.